


you can’t choose what stays and what fades away

by flightofwonder



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: (or a not-sad ending?), Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Protective Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Protective Nile Freeman, Team as Family, Temporary Character Death, Whumptober 2020, forced murder, i love joe and nile really i do, sex trafficking (implied but not shown), that's why i'm hurting them a lot this month, unconditional love and trust baby!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:42:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26779798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flightofwonder/pseuds/flightofwonder
Summary: So she knew what Joe would tell her to do, and he’d smile while doing it. Hell, if they were in a safehouse working out a hypothetical, instead of an abandoned warehouse, Joe would be cracking some joke about it.But when Nile pointed her gun to the center of Joe’s chest, she didn’t feel much like laughing.
Relationships: Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani
Comments: 8
Kudos: 161
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	you can’t choose what stays and what fades away

**Author's Note:**

> Whumptober Prompts: “Pick Who Dies”, Shot
> 
> As for all of whumptober, please mind the tags.

This was laughable. Literally, this was something the two of them should be able to laugh about. Not the life-threatening stakes, exactly, but the absurdities that led them here. An evil man ripped from the pages of a bad detective novel thinking he had any say in how the rest of this evening was going to go. Yeah, that should have been hilarious.

Being unable to die didn’t make anything easier, exactly but it did provide shortcuts. Nile hadn’t been much for the team's gallows humor at first, but by now she knew that some of those shortcuts were so fucking ridiculous, they couldn’t help but be funny. Well, to those in their situation, anyway.

_“I was alive before buildings were that tall.”_

_“You backing out?”_

_“I’m saying you’re somewhat inexperienced by comparison.”_

_“Okay, fuck you, just for that, I’m making the glass extra crunchy for you to deal with.”_

Nile and Joe shared an affinity for being direct. When you couldn’t die, sometimes the best way out was through. They had bonded over that. Like they had bonded over preferring hand-to-hand combat to long-range weapons, and secretly loving Disney movies, and always demanding cinnamon in their hot chocolate. She didn’t have a thousand years with any of them yet, but she liked to think she knew her team. Knew Joe.

So she knew what Joe would tell her to do, and he’d smile while doing it. Hell, if they were in a safehouse working out a hypothetical, instead of an abandoned warehouse, Joe would be cracking some joke about it. 

But when Nile pointed her gun to the center of Joe’s chest, she didn’t feel much like laughing.

One of the goons had twisted her arm behind her back, hard, leaving her with barely enough balance to stand upright. Nile didn’t make so much as a grunt in response, but Joe’s eyes had still hardened, and he’d spat something out in the local language when she felt the press of a gun to the side of her head.

This evil white man of the week wasn’t particularly noteworthy. His vicious smirk and haughty demeanor blended with the hundreds of other entitled pricks Nile had helped stop. He’d be joining his kind one way or another, either here or a hundred years from now, rotting in a jail cell. But before that could happen, Nile had to follow through.

“Kill your accomplice. Or we kill our stolen goods --”

“ _Kids_ ,” Nile spat out.

“-- And kill you both anyway.” 

Her options were extremely limited, and there was a clear right answer, here. She could insist on them shooting her, but that would leave both of them unarmed in the end. But if she shot Joe, if she gave what these sadistic assholes wanted, she’d have maneuverability, and more importantly, she’d have those extra seconds of distraction to turn the gun against her enemies.

But she felt a bit sick, treating anyone on her team like a reasonable sacrifice to pull off a successful strategy. Nile had measures for what she would allow herself to turn into with her immortality. And every instinct in her fought against allowing this.

Maybe if Nile had a hundred years under her belt, if she had seen Joe come back to life more than just a handful of times in the past couple of years, she could do this without blinking, without hesitating. It made sense. It would buy them time to get the kids somewhere safe. It was the _right thing to do_. 

But with Joe kneeling there in front of her, nothing but flesh between that beautiful heart and a bullet, Nile’s finger struggled to reach the trigger.

_One day your wounds just don’t heal up anymore, and we don’t know when, or why._

Nile had been a witness to a transformation of mortality with Andy, something the others had only known about in theory until then. They didn’t know why, of course, but they all had their own ideas about destiny. If Nile was the reason Andy was mortal now, what did that mean for the next oldest of the group? 

For all their bravado, for all their strategies that allowed them seemingly superhuman abilities, the fear of death was still alive and well in these immortals. She remembered Andy screaming at Booker to wake up, still a cold corpse under her fingers. The few times she’d seen Joe or Nicky die, the other’s terror was palpable until they returned to life. They liked to tell themselves otherwise, but when faced with options like this, it became staggeringly clear that there were no rules. There was no way to know which death would be their last.

Could she look Nicky in the eye if Joe’s last death came at her hand? 

_Two shots, quick kill,_ said a voice from an ancient past. But her trigger finger trembled, just slightly.

“Nile.” Joe's voice was warm, easing her attention from the barrel of the gun, “It’s okay.”

During scenarios like this, Joe would usually pretend to be rattled, keeping up the pretense of mortality with a veneer that only the team could see through. But Joe wasn’t bothering with the show. If anything, he appeared perfectly calm and centered. His bloody lips told a story of a brutal beating before he got dragged in here, but they were still turned upwards in a soft smile. All that casual gentleness. All Joe.

Nile couldn’t understand why he dropped this pretense at first, but when she realized, her heart lept to her throat.

He was doing this for her. To help her get through this and do what she needed to do.

_Two shots, quick kill._

She still had nightmares about the first man he killed. She had no doubt Joe would be joining him in her dreams, no matter how this turned out.

But that didn’t matter. There was no good choice to make - but there was a _right_ one.

And Joe - Joe wasn't afraid. 

Nile took a breath, forced aside images of cocky grins and warm hugs, of safety and kinship and _home_ \- and Joe exhaled. 

_Two shots, quick kill._

The bullets tore through Joe’s chest like paper, but Nile didn’t see more than a second of the carnage before she ground her heel into her captor’s shin and whipped the gun around, killing two men instantly.

It was chaos after that, but Nile had been with the team long enough to know how to utilize chaos. Drawing the fire away from Joe and the hostages, she rammed her full body weight in the opposite direction, knowing Joe would defend the kids as soon as he revived. She took out as many men as she could, fiercely ignoring the bullets that lodged in her chest, pushing headfirst through the pain.

She knocked one man down only to have a gun pointed at her head. Before she could react, a loud blast sounded. The man holding the gun fell like a puppet with his strings cut. Joe must have gotten a weapon off one of the dead men.

Nile looked over her shoulder, and when Joe smiled at her this time, his bloodstained lips told a different story.

* * *

Afterward, with all the hostages retrieved safely and the body of a monster in a bag, Nile ignored the surrounding sirens and chattering police to march straight towards Joe.

She steeled herself, opening her mouth.

“I’m -”

“You did good,” he didn’t let her get her apology out because of course he didn’t, _asshole_ , but even with the blood that coated both of them, seeing the return of that easy grin on his face immediately settled something that had been sick in her stomach. 

Still, her eyes wandered to the gaping hole in his shirt, revealing the patch of skin right above his heart. It was a chasm with bloody and frayed edges, and she remembered the split-second of brutal intrusion, the following death and destruction. She had done that. 

Joe took her hand and put it in the same spot, and while it felt almost uncomfortably intimate at first, it did reassure her to feel warm flesh under her fingers where she had expected the carnage from before. He was still whole. Nile might have killed him, but he was still here.

“You did good, Nile,” he repeated himself, quieter this time, and she went easily when he pulled her in for a hug. The smell of copper was so strong she could taste it, but she could also feel his heart in his chest, loud and strong. She closed her eyes.

Maybe, in a thousand years, they’ll have enough distance to laugh about this. Somehow, Nile doubted it. 

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr: [flightsofwonder](https://flightsofwonder.tumblr.com/)


End file.
